It seems that hardware anti-aliasing is definitely better than software anti-aliasing.
Gotta give a big "duh" here.
Of course it is.
And that doesn't solve the problem. Heck, it doesn't even address the problem. XP has anti-aliased fonts available through the base Windows services. The issue is that X/Windows does not. There are X libraries that do, but Mozilla isn't currently built on one, and the work necessary to move to it is non-trivial.
Re:Several cool Features
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- Directories to hold recordings
Actually until I have much larger disc capacity on a DVR I don't see a pressing need for this. Until I have more than 100 hours (approx. 100 gigs) of shows, having them in a single directory isn't a big deal.
Add a HD to your TiVo and you can have well over 100 hours of recording (basic quality). There are already people running into issues with this on TiVo. There's a hack out there to change the listings from "Showname" to "Showname: Title" because "Showname" just isn't enough info (not even on a 30 hour TiVo IMO).
How much space is left on my hard drive indicator
Why should I care?
Agreed in general, but I would like to know how much recording capacity is left, at various recording levels. It'd let me know if something was about to get deleted or not.
Yes, the TiVo suggestions usually do a good enough job of this by themselves, but I've seen at least one occasion where there were no suggestions but plenty of free space (which I didn't know immediately - I'd been on vacation for a week and thought stuff was about to get deleted).
- And I don't even want to get into network functionality.
Yeah this would be nice. Of course the Series 2 TiVO has this.
Kind of. It has USB 1.1. Which is really too slow for transferring shows around in a reasonable manner.
It sounds like this product isn't quite there yet, but it's probably a damn site closer than any other roll-your-own so far. I have 2 TiVo's and love them. But I wouldn't mind seeing a roll-your-own one too, since it'll inevitably have features beyond what manufacturers are willing to do (with the probable downside of being less user-friendly for far, far too long).
As others have pointed out, the issue is patches. In theory, it's not an issue having Mac, Linux, PC, etc. versions of an online game. Once you throw embedded systems into the loop (which is what the PS2 is, essentially), things become different fast.
That's one of many reasons that the console port of online games never interfaces with the real one. The other reason being that, in general, PC users will trash console users due to superior controls (go find and read Jon Carmack's statement on the PS2 version of Q3 for instance...)
that these games that 'simulate' real life are a BIG waste of time
In no way, shape, or form does EQ, UO, AO, DAoC, etc. simulate "real life". They don't even vaguely attempt to.
They do vaguely attempt to simulate a fantasy world, but most of the nitty gritty stuff that makes life real is not simulated.
Talking to people online isn't simulated either. The fact that you seem to think so shows just how vapid and shallow you really are. There's a real person on the other end of those pixels, who has feelings, thoughts, and motivations just like you do. And therein lies the rub, and the reason why EQ and other MMORPGs have a following that eclipses pretty much every other game out there. Because not only do they allow you to "do cool stuff you never usually do", but they allow you to make friends, chat, and have the social interaction that is lacking in most other games.
Yes, yes, scoff if you want at the concept of social interaction. Then realize that/. itself is another form of that as long as you're a poster (gee, look, you are - and a rather prolific one as well). Social interaction hasn't been limited to face-to-face meetings ever since the invention of writing. The Internet, in all its varied forms, is just another version thereof.
If you haven't played an MORPG (which includes MUDs) then you won't Get It. Quake and the like aren't the same - the little interaction there is mostly trash talk. IRC, Instant Messanging, and so forth are pretty similar to MORPG's though. All of them allow the intellectual excercise of talking to an intelligent being that is not yourself, and who may agree or disagree with your goals, thoughts, yada yada yada. Yeah, I know, seems all mystic-y and crap, but that's a lot of what human interaction comes down to.
Why do "losers" (your term, not mine) gravitate toward online interaction? Because for introverted personalities (which most geeks are), it's easier to hide behind a persona than it is to go out in real life. It's a matter of comfort and of being able to distance yourself. And to lower those facades at a speed you feel comfortable with (and yes, they do come down as you get to know people better).
All of the crap that occurs in face-to-face interaction - bickering, rumormongering, petty feuds, etc. happen online as well. All of the good stuff - friendships, loves, happiness, etc. can happen as well.
When I heard of people getting 'married' in these games, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
Shrug. I've always thought these things were rather silly myself. Most of the real life couples I know who are married aren't married "in-game". Probably because it's assumed they're married.
And I know people who gotten married to people they met online. Most of them don't have "in-game" marraiges either. I don't.
Look at World War 2 - the fire bombing of various German cities was considered to result in acceptable civilian casualties.
Now look at the Gulf War and how many civilian casualties there were (probably the best comparative method would be to count successful military objectives eliminated - counting number of bombs dropped will result in wacky numbers, since carpet bombing involved hundreds or thousands of bombs for a single target, vs. 1 or 2 bombs with laser guidance).
And despite all of this, there were anti-war protestors complaining about every dollar spent in military R&D. It's hard to say that this couldn't turn out to be the same case.
And, regardless, this ignores that the primary purpose for the nuclear weapon testing usage of this computer isn't to design new weapons, it's to ensure that the current weapons are effective and are not dangerous in storage.
We can intimidate the rest of the world into going along with us in public; we don't even need our military might to do that (although it does help), our economic clout is sufficient to scare the pants off of anyone with anything to lose.
The obvious issue is, what about those without anything to lose? Or those who perceive they don't have anything at least?
Most terrorists fall into that category. So do most religious zealots. The former have stooped to terrorism because they lack any more effective means to do so. The latter believe that they are in The Right and will be rewarded in the afterlife for anything they do to further The Cause.
Yes, yes... I know... designing new nuclear weapons isn't exactly going to help on this front in the larger sense. But there's the few insane and powerful where it may help. Modern day reference would be (at least from the US's point of view) Saddam Hussein. He's been trying to get nukes for over a decade now, and would be more than willing to use one on Israel or the USA. In this case some improved nukes may be of use.
If we're not going to build the things, we shouldn't waste the resources designing them.
I'll disagree to a certain extent. The mere process of designing them may teach us more about the physics of nuclear explosions (questionable, since a simulation will be an implementation of what we believe happens in reality, instead of measuring what actually occurs in reality).
The other issue is that the nuclear simulations are not purely for designing new weapons. A lot of them are to simulate what the effectiveness of the current nuclear arsenal is. From what I understand, there's a good bit of question if the weapons built in the late 60s and 70s would even be functional today. The half-life on some of the elements is short enough, and the tolerances they were designed within tight enough, that attempting to detonate one may result in a smaller-than-expected explosion, or a complete dud.
Any Windows based web browser can make use of the free utility Popup Stopper. It will stop any pop-ups as well, and allow you to disable/enable it by double clicking the toolbar icon, or hold down shift and click a link to temporarily allow popups.
That said, neither Mozilla or Popup Stopper or anything else are going to stop the slimy advertising being discussed. Because this isn't a pop-up, it's a download, and they're handled differently.
Look if you don't want to view a site's ads, then don't go to the site. It is as simple as that. Blocking certain portions of a site's content because you don't personally want to see it is definitely immoral and arguably illegal
What a load of horse pucky.
I understand that websites have to generate revenue, and that the current method is moving more toward pop-up/under ads. That's fine. That doesn't mean I have to subject myself to it. As an informed consumer I have the right to ignore the ads in whatever way I deem fit, whether that means closing the windows as they come up or telling my computer to not allow them to render in the first place.
Should a browser default to stopping pop-ups? Hell no. It breaks too many sites that use pop-ups for additional help/information windows, sites that load links in a new window, etc. But I should certainly have the option to kill pop-ups if I want to enable it (and preferably with a quick key to reenable them - like Popup Stopper has).
Want to argue otherwise? Go for it. You also watch every commercial on TV, right? No getting up to go to the bathroom/kitchen. No recording it to VCR or PVR and fast forwarding/skipping through the commercials. Because if you are then, by your own definition, you are immoral. Maybe even commiting a crime!
Oh, and do you read every ad in a magazine? Do you throw out those blown-in/tear-out cards in magazines before someone else can read them? Do you read every billboard that passes by while in a car? EVERY TIME?
I don't think so.
And yes, I know this was a troll. Congrats. But this kind of thinking might actually get some people that nod and drool "yes", and it's so abundantly stupid it needs to be shut down before hand.
Much spoilers below. If you haven't figured out the entire movie yet.
The guy from "My So Called Life" who played the crazy heir just had bad dialog throughout.
What, you mean the lazy, incompetent druggie who had done nothing his entire life but wait for his dad (or grandfather, or whoever) to die?
Gee, think someone like that might not be the most eloquent speaker in the world?
Although, personally, I didn't find anything wrong with his dialog as given. But then again, I apparantly "got" the character, which you didn't.
When Foster was rooting around for food (or insulin, whatever), the daughter was in the panic room still. No hostage yet. She could have called the cops. The father was dead (presumably, or had he even showed up yet?).
Yes he was around. You clearly don't even remember the movie. He was used as a ruse to get her out of the room in the first place, since she thought Burnham had knocked out Mr. Ski Mask and dragged him down the stairs.
Given that, what are you going to do with the precious few seconds you have? Try and call 911, or QUIETLY sneak downstairs and retrieve the item you NEED to save your daughter's life?
Of course, I doubt you have kids, have close friends who have kids, or have been thinking about having kids. So this whole concept of protect-your-children-at-all-costs doesn't make any sense to you yet.
Also, didn't they "lock her in" by screwing in all the doors?
Again, you didn't even bother watching the movie. The back doors were screwed shut. The windows had bars on them. The front door, on the other hand, was merely barricaded shut. This was clearly shown.
Other people mentioned all the propane shit, no need to repeat that
This is the one logic hole that I'll give you. But, frankly, relatively few people know that propane is heavier than air. Yes, it was innacurate. If you're going to eliminate every movie, book, or other entertainment that makes factual errors, you're going to be watching/reading, well, pretty much nothing.
The movie was so unplausable and also so unfunny, it really lost its entertainment value far too early
Shrug. I enjoyed it up until the very end. The end was weak, however, and left too many questions unanswered.
I, for instance, would love to have a clone of my heart available when my own one needs replacement in a couple of decades (not entirely unlikely given the number of heart deseases in my family).
One of the biggest pushes for research into cloning and stem cell technology is for this kind of thing. Being able to grow a new organ, either cultured from your own cells, or from a stem-cell line that closely matches yours, would result in a vastly reduced rate of rejection. And the reason transplant patients die is not because of some inherent medical/surgical issue from the transplantation, but rather the body's attempts to reject the transplantation as a foreign body. There are drugs to combat this, but take too little and you get rejection. Take too much and you open up your system to real infections. Either way it's fatal.
The support for full on human cloning is relatively small. And it's not just due to religious reasons - there are ethical and societal reasons why full cloning is reprehensible to some people.
Of course I wouldn't want to kill a full grown living and breading clone of me to obtain that heart but that may very well be unnecessary
Well that's good, because doing that would be murder. Your clone is not you. He does not belong to you. Believing otherwise is simply a new twist on slavery, nothing more. Odds are, your clone won't even think like you, because he is an entirely separate and independant person.
Hell, just not having a pci card plugged in correctly can totatly trash a computer with a low quality MB. Ever pulled out a PCI card when the system is running? Sometimes it reboots, sometimes it don't.
The proper thing for the system to do in this case would be to fry itself. This is, in fact, what occurs in a large number of systems.
The only variablility should be if the sound card will scream "YOU IDIOT" first or not.
Gee, let's see... nForce came out when? Oh yes... about a month before Win95 was officially decommissioned.
Not having Win98/ME drivers is vaguely surprising, but not too much so.
And, of course, like everyone else, I have to question just how smart you were to buy the nForce board when there's no driver support for the OS you wanted to run. If you bought the board first and figured it out second, well, that should damn well teach you to do your homework next time.
You do realize that there are highly integrated KT266A and KT333 motherboards out there, right? The only thing the nForce 420 has that they don't is integrated video.
Finally... uh... added 50%? What exactly did you build? WinXP Home OEM is $88. OEM Pro is $140. The home edition is already less than the cost of the motherboard, the Pro is pretty close to the cost. Once you add a hard drive, memory, CPU, keyboard, mouse, and monitor there's no way in hell that it's 50% more. Yeah, you were probably upgrading piecemeal. Again, you fucked up and didn't do your research, but want to blame someone else for it instead of accepting your own screwup.
While the list you give you TV recording and playback, it's nowhere even vaguely close to TiVo-like.
Read what he (and others used to TiVo) asked for, and you'll note you didn't answer the question.
First off, the hardware solution given is very, very low quality. The recording is MPEG-1 IIRC, and low-bitrate at that. The playback is fixed resolution (so if you have a big-screen HD-ready TV, you've screwed yourself -- flipside is that TiVo is pure NTSC as well, so it doesn't exactly do wonders for bigscreen HD-ready either).
Second, the real contention is not the hardware, but the software. Pausing live TV is not an optional feature. 2+ weeks of guide data is not an option. Automagic recording of a show instead of punching in day/time data is not an option.
Ok, so maybe those features ARE an option to you or to others who haven't used TiVo, but it merely means that your solution is behind the times. And yes, all of these things are harder than they seem. And yet, people whine about having to pay TiVo for exactly this kind of thing.
All that said, your solution does work, and is a low-budget alternative to the AIW card, TiVo, Replay, etc. It does lack some features, but what can you expect for something that is half the cost (or less)? I just wanted to note that you didn't actually answer the question being asked.
Agreed. But take it a step further - exactly how are you supposed to update embedded hardware? Replace all the surface mounted ROMs that the software may be burned into?
Perhaps the teraforming of venus or mars would be a more practical consideration for the next 100 years.
It'd take considerably longer than 100 years to terraform either planet. And that's ignoring the little issue that we haven't even visited either one with anything but robotic probes still.
The lack of fast space travel hampers terraforming efforts as well, since any reasonable plan involves mining the rest of the solar system for necessary components - nitrogen and ice water for Mars, who-knows-what for Venus (and Venus is further from the resources in general, although that's entirely dependant on orbital mechanics really).
In any case, most "realistic" terraforming timelines are centuries long. And even if we had the technology to do it (we don't), there's a minor issue of finding funding for that long of a period and being able to actually come out ahead of the game after compound interest has taken it's toll (contemplate 1 trillion US dollars at even 1% interest for 500 years - it requires a 14740.30% rate of return).
Yes, we have absolutely no way to populate another world right now either. But the incentives to go there would be considerably higher than trying to terraform a neighboring planet. If nothing else, a fly-by probe moving at a considerably fraction of c could visit a solar system ~20 light years away in under a century. If it has the right equipment it should be able to tell us if there's life on that planet. That would go a long way toward answering the "are we alone?" question.
Of course, there's the issue with financial backing there too, and the minor nit that we have absolutely no infrastructure (particularly solar power stations) to do this either, but if you want to put an somewhat arbitrary 100 year limit on goals, then a probe flyby of a nearby earth-like planet seems more realistic to me than terraforming.
Probably because you showed an utter lack of knowledge regarding interface speeds, as well as different design goals for different interfaces.
Serial ATA doesn't fix all of the issues with ATA, but it fixes a lot of them. It also considerably ups the maximum speed on the device chain. It's designed for internal, high speed, drive-to-host communications.
USB is an entirely different beast. It's low speed (yes, it is), with a lot of overhead (since it supports pretty much anything connecting to it), and is designed purely for short-run external connections.
Could you internalize USB2? Sure. But you've tossed a boatload of bandwidth and added a boatload of additional data to the stream in order to handle external/anything devices. You're using a hammer instead of a screwdriver here.
And thank you for being foolish enough to say that interfaceXYZ has more bandwidth than any drive can run at. You know, once upon a time MFM had more bandwidth than the drives could handle. And we won't even talk about burst transmission - since drives do fill ATA100 to the brim. Oh, and we'll also ignore the joys of RAID, where even fibre channel is struggling to get enough bandwidth at times.
'interesting' or 'informative' or even 'redundant' (if you must), but CLEARLY not a troll. sheesh.
I don't see a big hue and cry to lynch the metal detector jockeys and their bosses.
Uh... right... and so I suppose the minor fact that they're all being fired and replaced by government employees isn't effectively a lynching.
Of course, this is ignoring that 6 of the confirmed hijackers were, in fact, tagged for special screening at Boston's airport and passed through it. It's also ignoring the little detail that, to the best of our knowledge, they never took anything onto the plane that was illegal at the time.
While I hardly think that the screening mechanisms we have are effective, I also think that the INS and Customs should be getting more heat than they are.
To get (somewhat) back on target - go read A Canticle for Leibowitz for a very interesting post-apocolyptic future.
No, no, no! I'd much rather go for wild ass theories that have no basis in fundamental physics than something that's actually plausible once you know the actual data.
Correct... and the I128 series (I was for Imagine) was blindingly fast for the time. And it had OS/2 drivers! Bundled! There weren't any XFree drivers (at least not at first), but there was a 3rd party X Server who had drivers available... blanking on the name at the moment.
I was fortunate enough to win one of these cards at Comdex/Spring back when they came out in the early 90s... and I remember going home, installing it in my 486DX2/50 w/ 16 MB of RAM running OS/2 2.1 and doing some really basic benchmarks... and making everyone on EFnet #os2 envious. It was the first card that could scroll text faster in a window (at 1024x768) than in a full screen session.
IIRC, it had 4 MB of memory, which was a boatload at the time.
Have you actually seeen any modern power generating windmills? Any bird that gets shredded by the vanes on one of those deserves to die of stupidity. They don't rotate that fast.
I agree, in general, that they aren't a viable solution though, due to both space and cost constraints.
Yes, but how is this any different from the employee that cube surfs all day with a coffee cup?
The issue is not technology, it's management. If you have ineffective management who can't take care of unproductive workers (preferably by reorienting them to do work -- firing should always be a last resort), then they'll waste time during work one way or another. The internet is just another outlet, just like the water cooler, the break room, or anything else.
Frankly, most companies I know of that have started getting really draconian in their Internet "security" have gone under shortly thereafter. Why? Because they stopped focusing on what their business was and instead focused on relatively minor infractions by their employees. Needless to say, this doesn't help morale, and employees start finding more ways to avoid doing work. It becomes a death spiral.
I'm not saying that the 'net should be a wide open playground. Employers should monitor usage so that management can reign in employees that are spending too much time surfing. Anyone who surfs for pr0n from work is just asking to be fired nowadays. And blocking the more pervasive virus attachments is just common sense.
That's what it comes down to, really. Common sense. Whenever employees or management step over the line then things go badly. Funny that.
You're forgetting the people that collect thousands of mp3s.
No he's not. Let's read the statement again. (Emphasis mine)
what regular home user ever needs that much space?
Anyone collecting enough MP3's, MPEG-4's, or whatever to need a 120GB drive doesn't fall into the category of a "regular" user currently.
And, more to the point, anyone who does need the storage space for their home-grown collection is also going to be the kind of person that needs more than 8 hours/day of uptime.
Have to agree with the original poster here - the drives have no market if you plan to stay in spec.
Of course, a lot of the drives will end up used in 12-24 hours/day situations by people. And some may actually live a "normal" lifespan. But you're playing russian roulette with your data and pocketbook at that point. I'm sure I'm not the only one who will say "no thanks" to that.
No. WHQL is only for hardware drivers. It is not their job to sign off on installation programs for random application software you may be interested in.
It's really amazing to see how much cluelessness is going on in this thread. Spyware programs are becoming pervasive on the Windows platform (and they could be written for Linux too if the spyers felt the marketshare was large enough to care about). And it's not just free software doing it. Pseudo-free software like Eudora is a huge culprit of spyware. And there are an increasingly large number of commercial software packages that install spyware to one extent or another (and while Creative may allow you to not install it, other software doesn't). MOST of the spyware doesn't bother asking you if you want to install it, and doesn't make any evidence of itself being installed. Probably because nobody in their right mind would want it installed.
And, sadly, it's a case of "it's not illegal, so it must be legal" reasoning that's going on here. You might be able to make a case for theft of computer services and/or trespassing, but it'd be a stretch.
The issue is that you emit infrared energy constantly. About the only way to be "invisible" would be to have the ambiant air be the same temperature as you. Good luck.
Even after that you're going to leave tracks - either hotter or colder than the ground - which can be a pretty big giveaway.
Realistically, the idea here isn't to become perfectly invisible. It's to reduce visibility to opponents. If you refract enough of the light around you so that your enemy can't see you before you're in firing range, then the fact that he can see you when you get 100 meters away is pretty irrelevant. By the time you're 100 meters away, he's dead.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that hardware anti-aliasing is definitely better than software anti-aliasing.
Gotta give a big "duh" here.
Of course it is.
And that doesn't solve the problem. Heck, it doesn't even address the problem. XP has anti-aliased fonts available through the base Windows services. The issue is that X/Windows does not. There are X libraries that do, but Mozilla isn't currently built on one, and the work necessary to move to it is non-trivial.
- Directories to hold recordings
Actually until I have much larger disc capacity on a DVR I don't see a pressing need for this. Until I have more than 100 hours (approx. 100 gigs) of shows, having them in a single directory isn't a big deal.
Add a HD to your TiVo and you can have well over 100 hours of recording (basic quality). There are already people running into issues with this on TiVo. There's a hack out there to change the listings from "Showname" to "Showname: Title" because "Showname" just isn't enough info (not even on a 30 hour TiVo IMO).
How much space is left on my hard drive indicator
Why should I care?
Agreed in general, but I would like to know how much recording capacity is left, at various recording levels. It'd let me know if something was about to get deleted or not.
Yes, the TiVo suggestions usually do a good enough job of this by themselves, but I've seen at least one occasion where there were no suggestions but plenty of free space (which I didn't know immediately - I'd been on vacation for a week and thought stuff was about to get deleted).
- And I don't even want to get into network functionality.
Yeah this would be nice. Of course the Series 2 TiVO has this.
Kind of. It has USB 1.1. Which is really too slow for transferring shows around in a reasonable manner.
It sounds like this product isn't quite there yet, but it's probably a damn site closer than any other roll-your-own so far. I have 2 TiVo's and love them. But I wouldn't mind seeing a roll-your-own one too, since it'll inevitably have features beyond what manufacturers are willing to do (with the probable downside of being less user-friendly for far, far too long).
As others have pointed out, the issue is patches. In theory, it's not an issue having Mac, Linux, PC, etc. versions of an online game. Once you throw embedded systems into the loop (which is what the PS2 is, essentially), things become different fast.
That's one of many reasons that the console port of online games never interfaces with the real one. The other reason being that, in general, PC users will trash console users due to superior controls (go find and read Jon Carmack's statement on the PS2 version of Q3 for instance...)
that these games that 'simulate' real life are a BIG waste of time
/. itself is another form of that as long as you're a poster (gee, look, you are - and a rather prolific one as well). Social interaction hasn't been limited to face-to-face meetings ever since the invention of writing. The Internet, in all its varied forms, is just another version thereof.
In no way, shape, or form does EQ, UO, AO, DAoC, etc. simulate "real life". They don't even vaguely attempt to.
They do vaguely attempt to simulate a fantasy world, but most of the nitty gritty stuff that makes life real is not simulated.
Talking to people online isn't simulated either. The fact that you seem to think so shows just how vapid and shallow you really are. There's a real person on the other end of those pixels, who has feelings, thoughts, and motivations just like you do. And therein lies the rub, and the reason why EQ and other MMORPGs have a following that eclipses pretty much every other game out there. Because not only do they allow you to "do cool stuff you never usually do", but they allow you to make friends, chat, and have the social interaction that is lacking in most other games.
Yes, yes, scoff if you want at the concept of social interaction. Then realize that
If you haven't played an MORPG (which includes MUDs) then you won't Get It. Quake and the like aren't the same - the little interaction there is mostly trash talk. IRC, Instant Messanging, and so forth are pretty similar to MORPG's though. All of them allow the intellectual excercise of talking to an intelligent being that is not yourself, and who may agree or disagree with your goals, thoughts, yada yada yada. Yeah, I know, seems all mystic-y and crap, but that's a lot of what human interaction comes down to.
Why do "losers" (your term, not mine) gravitate toward online interaction? Because for introverted personalities (which most geeks are), it's easier to hide behind a persona than it is to go out in real life. It's a matter of comfort and of being able to distance yourself. And to lower those facades at a speed you feel comfortable with (and yes, they do come down as you get to know people better).
All of the crap that occurs in face-to-face interaction - bickering, rumormongering, petty feuds, etc. happen online as well. All of the good stuff - friendships, loves, happiness, etc. can happen as well.
When I heard of people getting 'married' in these games, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
Shrug. I've always thought these things were rather silly myself. Most of the real life couples I know who are married aren't married "in-game". Probably because it's assumed they're married.
And I know people who gotten married to people they met online. Most of them don't have "in-game" marraiges either. I don't.
It's all relative.
Look at World War 2 - the fire bombing of various German cities was considered to result in acceptable civilian casualties.
Now look at the Gulf War and how many civilian casualties there were (probably the best comparative method would be to count successful military objectives eliminated - counting number of bombs dropped will result in wacky numbers, since carpet bombing involved hundreds or thousands of bombs for a single target, vs. 1 or 2 bombs with laser guidance).
And despite all of this, there were anti-war protestors complaining about every dollar spent in military R&D. It's hard to say that this couldn't turn out to be the same case.
And, regardless, this ignores that the primary purpose for the nuclear weapon testing usage of this computer isn't to design new weapons, it's to ensure that the current weapons are effective and are not dangerous in storage.
We can intimidate the rest of the world into going along with us in public; we don't even need our military might to do that (although it does help), our economic clout is sufficient to scare the pants off of anyone with anything to lose.
The obvious issue is, what about those without anything to lose? Or those who perceive they don't have anything at least?
Most terrorists fall into that category. So do most religious zealots. The former have stooped to terrorism because they lack any more effective means to do so. The latter believe that they are in The Right and will be rewarded in the afterlife for anything they do to further The Cause.
Yes, yes... I know... designing new nuclear weapons isn't exactly going to help on this front in the larger sense. But there's the few insane and powerful where it may help. Modern day reference would be (at least from the US's point of view) Saddam Hussein. He's been trying to get nukes for over a decade now, and would be more than willing to use one on Israel or the USA. In this case some improved nukes may be of use.
If we're not going to build the things, we shouldn't waste the resources designing them.
I'll disagree to a certain extent. The mere process of designing them may teach us more about the physics of nuclear explosions (questionable, since a simulation will be an implementation of what we believe happens in reality, instead of measuring what actually occurs in reality).
The other issue is that the nuclear simulations are not purely for designing new weapons. A lot of them are to simulate what the effectiveness of the current nuclear arsenal is. From what I understand, there's a good bit of question if the weapons built in the late 60s and 70s would even be functional today. The half-life on some of the elements is short enough, and the tolerances they were designed within tight enough, that attempting to detonate one may result in a smaller-than-expected explosion, or a complete dud.
Any Windows based web browser can make use of the free utility Popup Stopper. It will stop any pop-ups as well, and allow you to disable/enable it by double clicking the toolbar icon, or hold down shift and click a link to temporarily allow popups.
That said, neither Mozilla or Popup Stopper or anything else are going to stop the slimy advertising being discussed. Because this isn't a pop-up, it's a download, and they're handled differently.
Look if you don't want to view a site's ads, then don't go to the site. It is as simple as that. Blocking certain portions of a site's content because you don't personally want to see it is definitely immoral and arguably illegal
What a load of horse pucky.
I understand that websites have to generate revenue, and that the current method is moving more toward pop-up/under ads. That's fine. That doesn't mean I have to subject myself to it. As an informed consumer I have the right to ignore the ads in whatever way I deem fit, whether that means closing the windows as they come up or telling my computer to not allow them to render in the first place.
Should a browser default to stopping pop-ups? Hell no. It breaks too many sites that use pop-ups for additional help/information windows, sites that load links in a new window, etc. But I should certainly have the option to kill pop-ups if I want to enable it (and preferably with a quick key to reenable them - like Popup Stopper has).
Want to argue otherwise? Go for it. You also watch every commercial on TV, right? No getting up to go to the bathroom/kitchen. No recording it to VCR or PVR and fast forwarding/skipping through the commercials. Because if you are then, by your own definition, you are immoral. Maybe even commiting a crime!
Oh, and do you read every ad in a magazine? Do you throw out those blown-in/tear-out cards in magazines before someone else can read them? Do you read every billboard that passes by while in a car? EVERY TIME?
I don't think so.
And yes, I know this was a troll. Congrats. But this kind of thinking might actually get some people that nod and drool "yes", and it's so abundantly stupid it needs to be shut down before hand.
Much spoilers below. If you haven't figured out the entire movie yet.
The guy from "My So Called Life" who played the crazy heir just had bad dialog throughout.
What, you mean the lazy, incompetent druggie who had done nothing his entire life but wait for his dad (or grandfather, or whoever) to die?
Gee, think someone like that might not be the most eloquent speaker in the world?
Although, personally, I didn't find anything wrong with his dialog as given. But then again, I apparantly "got" the character, which you didn't.
When Foster was rooting around for food (or insulin, whatever), the daughter was in the panic room still. No hostage yet. She could have called the cops. The father was dead (presumably, or had he even showed up yet?).
Yes he was around. You clearly don't even remember the movie. He was used as a ruse to get her out of the room in the first place, since she thought Burnham had knocked out Mr. Ski Mask and dragged him down the stairs.
Given that, what are you going to do with the precious few seconds you have? Try and call 911, or QUIETLY sneak downstairs and retrieve the item you NEED to save your daughter's life?
Of course, I doubt you have kids, have close friends who have kids, or have been thinking about having kids. So this whole concept of protect-your-children-at-all-costs doesn't make any sense to you yet.
Also, didn't they "lock her in" by screwing in all the doors?
Again, you didn't even bother watching the movie. The back doors were screwed shut. The windows had bars on them. The front door, on the other hand, was merely barricaded shut. This was clearly shown.
Other people mentioned all the propane shit, no need to repeat that
This is the one logic hole that I'll give you. But, frankly, relatively few people know that propane is heavier than air. Yes, it was innacurate. If you're going to eliminate every movie, book, or other entertainment that makes factual errors, you're going to be watching/reading, well, pretty much nothing.
The movie was so unplausable and also so unfunny, it really lost its entertainment value far too early
Shrug. I enjoyed it up until the very end. The end was weak, however, and left too many questions unanswered.
I, for instance, would love to have a clone of my heart available when my own one needs replacement in a couple of decades (not entirely unlikely given the number of heart deseases in my family).
One of the biggest pushes for research into cloning and stem cell technology is for this kind of thing. Being able to grow a new organ, either cultured from your own cells, or from a stem-cell line that closely matches yours, would result in a vastly reduced rate of rejection. And the reason transplant patients die is not because of some inherent medical/surgical issue from the transplantation, but rather the body's attempts to reject the transplantation as a foreign body. There are drugs to combat this, but take too little and you get rejection. Take too much and you open up your system to real infections. Either way it's fatal.
The support for full on human cloning is relatively small. And it's not just due to religious reasons - there are ethical and societal reasons why full cloning is reprehensible to some people.
Of course I wouldn't want to kill a full grown living and breading clone of me to obtain that heart but that may very well be unnecessary
Well that's good, because doing that would be murder. Your clone is not you. He does not belong to you. Believing otherwise is simply a new twist on slavery, nothing more. Odds are, your clone won't even think like you, because he is an entirely separate and independant person.
Hell, just not having a pci card plugged in correctly can totatly trash a computer with a low quality MB. Ever pulled out a PCI card when the system is running? Sometimes it reboots, sometimes it don't.
The proper thing for the system to do in this case would be to fry itself. This is, in fact, what occurs in a large number of systems.
The only variablility should be if the sound card will scream "YOU IDIOT" first or not.
Gee, let's see... nForce came out when? Oh yes... about a month before Win95 was officially decommissioned.
Not having Win98/ME drivers is vaguely surprising, but not too much so.
And, of course, like everyone else, I have to question just how smart you were to buy the nForce board when there's no driver support for the OS you wanted to run. If you bought the board first and figured it out second, well, that should damn well teach you to do your homework next time.
You do realize that there are highly integrated KT266A and KT333 motherboards out there, right? The only thing the nForce 420 has that they don't is integrated video.
Finally... uh... added 50%? What exactly did you build? WinXP Home OEM is $88. OEM Pro is $140. The home edition is already less than the cost of the motherboard, the Pro is pretty close to the cost. Once you add a hard drive, memory, CPU, keyboard, mouse, and monitor there's no way in hell that it's 50% more. Yeah, you were probably upgrading piecemeal. Again, you fucked up and didn't do your research, but want to blame someone else for it instead of accepting your own screwup.
While the list you give you TV recording and playback, it's nowhere even vaguely close to TiVo-like.
Read what he (and others used to TiVo) asked for, and you'll note you didn't answer the question.
First off, the hardware solution given is very, very low quality. The recording is MPEG-1 IIRC, and low-bitrate at that. The playback is fixed resolution (so if you have a big-screen HD-ready TV, you've screwed yourself -- flipside is that TiVo is pure NTSC as well, so it doesn't exactly do wonders for bigscreen HD-ready either).
Second, the real contention is not the hardware, but the software. Pausing live TV is not an optional feature. 2+ weeks of guide data is not an option. Automagic recording of a show instead of punching in day/time data is not an option.
Ok, so maybe those features ARE an option to you or to others who haven't used TiVo, but it merely means that your solution is behind the times. And yes, all of these things are harder than they seem. And yet, people whine about having to pay TiVo for exactly this kind of thing.
All that said, your solution does work, and is a low-budget alternative to the AIW card, TiVo, Replay, etc. It does lack some features, but what can you expect for something that is half the cost (or less)? I just wanted to note that you didn't actually answer the question being asked.
Agreed. But take it a step further - exactly how are you supposed to update embedded hardware? Replace all the surface mounted ROMs that the software may be burned into?
Uh....
The sub-100 year estimate includes the response time.
Yes, to go that far in time requires ~30% c, but that's theoretically possible with probes - acceleration gravities aren't an issue in general.
Perhaps the teraforming of venus or mars would be a more practical consideration for the next 100 years.
It'd take considerably longer than 100 years to terraform either planet. And that's ignoring the little issue that we haven't even visited either one with anything but robotic probes still.
The lack of fast space travel hampers terraforming efforts as well, since any reasonable plan involves mining the rest of the solar system for necessary components - nitrogen and ice water for Mars, who-knows-what for Venus (and Venus is further from the resources in general, although that's entirely dependant on orbital mechanics really).
In any case, most "realistic" terraforming timelines are centuries long. And even if we had the technology to do it (we don't), there's a minor issue of finding funding for that long of a period and being able to actually come out ahead of the game after compound interest has taken it's toll (contemplate 1 trillion US dollars at even 1% interest for 500 years - it requires a 14740.30% rate of return).
Yes, we have absolutely no way to populate another world right now either. But the incentives to go there would be considerably higher than trying to terraform a neighboring planet. If nothing else, a fly-by probe moving at a considerably fraction of c could visit a solar system ~20 light years away in under a century. If it has the right equipment it should be able to tell us if there's life on that planet. That would go a long way toward answering the "are we alone?" question.
Of course, there's the issue with financial backing there too, and the minor nit that we have absolutely no infrastructure (particularly solar power stations) to do this either, but if you want to put an somewhat arbitrary 100 year limit on goals, then a probe flyby of a nearby earth-like planet seems more realistic to me than terraforming.
Probably because you showed an utter lack of knowledge regarding interface speeds, as well as different design goals for different interfaces.
Serial ATA doesn't fix all of the issues with ATA, but it fixes a lot of them. It also considerably ups the maximum speed on the device chain. It's designed for internal, high speed, drive-to-host communications.
USB is an entirely different beast. It's low speed (yes, it is), with a lot of overhead (since it supports pretty much anything connecting to it), and is designed purely for short-run external connections.
Could you internalize USB2? Sure. But you've tossed a boatload of bandwidth and added a boatload of additional data to the stream in order to handle external/anything devices. You're using a hammer instead of a screwdriver here.
And thank you for being foolish enough to say that interfaceXYZ has more bandwidth than any drive can run at. You know, once upon a time MFM had more bandwidth than the drives could handle. And we won't even talk about burst transmission - since drives do fill ATA100 to the brim. Oh, and we'll also ignore the joys of RAID, where even fibre channel is struggling to get enough bandwidth at times.
'interesting' or 'informative' or even 'redundant' (if you must), but CLEARLY not a troll. sheesh.
I'd personally suggest Flamebait.
I don't see a big hue and cry to lynch the metal detector jockeys and their bosses.
Uh... right... and so I suppose the minor fact that they're all being fired and replaced by government employees isn't effectively a lynching.
Of course, this is ignoring that 6 of the confirmed hijackers were, in fact, tagged for special screening at Boston's airport and passed through it. It's also ignoring the little detail that, to the best of our knowledge, they never took anything onto the plane that was illegal at the time.
While I hardly think that the screening mechanisms we have are effective, I also think that the INS and Customs should be getting more heat than they are.
To get (somewhat) back on target - go read A Canticle for Leibowitz for a very interesting post-apocolyptic future.
No, no, no! I'd much rather go for wild ass theories that have no basis in fundamental physics than something that's actually plausible once you know the actual data.
Now where's that damn timecube site again?
Correct... and the I128 series (I was for Imagine) was blindingly fast for the time. And it had OS/2 drivers! Bundled! There weren't any XFree drivers (at least not at first), but there was a 3rd party X Server who had drivers available... blanking on the name at the moment.
I was fortunate enough to win one of these cards at Comdex/Spring back when they came out in the early 90s... and I remember going home, installing it in my 486DX2/50 w/ 16 MB of RAM running OS/2 2.1 and doing some really basic benchmarks... and making everyone on EFnet #os2 envious. It was the first card that could scroll text faster in a window (at 1024x768) than in a full screen session.
IIRC, it had 4 MB of memory, which was a boatload at the time.
Er... bird shredders?
Have you actually seeen any modern power generating windmills? Any bird that gets shredded by the vanes on one of those deserves to die of stupidity. They don't rotate that fast.
I agree, in general, that they aren't a viable solution though, due to both space and cost constraints.
Yes, but how is this any different from the employee that cube surfs all day with a coffee cup?
The issue is not technology, it's management. If you have ineffective management who can't take care of unproductive workers (preferably by reorienting them to do work -- firing should always be a last resort), then they'll waste time during work one way or another. The internet is just another outlet, just like the water cooler, the break room, or anything else.
Frankly, most companies I know of that have started getting really draconian in their Internet "security" have gone under shortly thereafter. Why? Because they stopped focusing on what their business was and instead focused on relatively minor infractions by their employees. Needless to say, this doesn't help morale, and employees start finding more ways to avoid doing work. It becomes a death spiral.
I'm not saying that the 'net should be a wide open playground. Employers should monitor usage so that management can reign in employees that are spending too much time surfing. Anyone who surfs for pr0n from work is just asking to be fired nowadays. And blocking the more pervasive virus attachments is just common sense.
That's what it comes down to, really. Common sense. Whenever employees or management step over the line then things go badly. Funny that.
You're forgetting the people that collect thousands of mp3s.
No he's not. Let's read the statement again. (Emphasis mine)
what regular home user ever needs that much space?
Anyone collecting enough MP3's, MPEG-4's, or whatever to need a 120GB drive doesn't fall into the category of a "regular" user currently.
And, more to the point, anyone who does need the storage space for their home-grown collection is also going to be the kind of person that needs more than 8 hours/day of uptime.
Have to agree with the original poster here - the drives have no market if you plan to stay in spec.
Of course, a lot of the drives will end up used in 12-24 hours/day situations by people. And some may actually live a "normal" lifespan. But you're playing russian roulette with your data and pocketbook at that point. I'm sure I'm not the only one who will say "no thanks" to that.
No. WHQL is only for hardware drivers. It is not their job to sign off on installation programs for random application software you may be interested in.
It's really amazing to see how much cluelessness is going on in this thread. Spyware programs are becoming pervasive on the Windows platform (and they could be written for Linux too if the spyers felt the marketshare was large enough to care about). And it's not just free software doing it. Pseudo-free software like Eudora is a huge culprit of spyware. And there are an increasingly large number of commercial software packages that install spyware to one extent or another (and while Creative may allow you to not install it, other software doesn't). MOST of the spyware doesn't bother asking you if you want to install it, and doesn't make any evidence of itself being installed. Probably because nobody in their right mind would want it installed.
And, sadly, it's a case of "it's not illegal, so it must be legal" reasoning that's going on here. You might be able to make a case for theft of computer services and/or trespassing, but it'd be a stretch.
The issue is that you emit infrared energy constantly. About the only way to be "invisible" would be to have the ambiant air be the same temperature as you. Good luck.
Even after that you're going to leave tracks - either hotter or colder than the ground - which can be a pretty big giveaway.
Realistically, the idea here isn't to become perfectly invisible. It's to reduce visibility to opponents. If you refract enough of the light around you so that your enemy can't see you before you're in firing range, then the fact that he can see you when you get 100 meters away is pretty irrelevant. By the time you're 100 meters away, he's dead.